Abstract
We measured the brightness of the white light corona at the total solar eclipses on 1 August 2008 and 22 July 2009, when solar activity was at its lowest in one hundred years. After careful calibration, the brightness of the corona in both eclipses was evaluated to be approximately 0.4×10−6 of the total brightness of the Sun, which is the lowest level ever observed. Furthermore, the total brightness of the K+F-corona beyond 3R ⊙ in both eclipses is lower than some of the previous measurements of the brightness of the F-corona only. Our accurate measurements of the coronal brightness provide not only the K-corona brightness during a period of very low solar activity but also a reliable upper limit of the brightness of the F-corona.
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Acknowledgements
One of the authors (YH) had appealed to the participants of commercial eclipse tours to take scientific data at the eclipse in 2009. He thanks all the people who responded to the appeal and expressed their intention to try to take the data, though not all of them succeeded in the observation, and he is also grateful to E. Hiei, who helped and encouraged the collaboration. He expresses thanks also to members of the eclipse expeditions of Kagoshima University and Kyoto University, and the detachments to China and Japan’s Tokara Island of the expeditions from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. Some of the instruments for the observation were prepared by the Advanced Technology Center at NAOJ.
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Hanaoka, Y., Kikuta, Y., Nakazawa, J. et al. Accurate Measurements of the Brightness of the White-Light Corona at the Total Solar Eclipses on 1 August 2008 and 22 July 2009. Sol Phys 279, 75–89 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-012-9984-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-012-9984-x